The human brain is the most complex organ in the body, sitting at the center of all human activities.  It is made up of many parts that work together as a team, when one member of the team becomes weak, the whole team weakens, and this is the effect of substance abuse and the brain.

There are areas in the brain that are affected by substance abuse and these areas are:

The brain stem controls heart rate, breathing and sleeping.

The limbic system controls the human’s feel for pleasure and is responsible for our positive and negative insight of other emotions.

The cerebral cortex controls specific functions that facilitate sight, touch, taste, and hearing, the front part of the cortex, is the thinking part that gives us our ability to think, plan, problem solve and make decisions.

Each nerve cell in the brain sends and receives messages in the form of electrical impulses and once a nerve cell sort out a message, it sends it to other neurons, which carries the messages between neurons by chemicals called neurotransmitters, which attaches itself to a receptor.

Transporters are the brain’s chemical recyclers; it is located on the cell that releases the neurotransmitter where they are recycled by transporters thus shutting off the signal between neurons.  So how do drugs work in the brain?  Drugs are chemical that work in the brain by tapping into the brain’s communication system and interfering with the way cells normally sort out messages.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is responsible for a human’s emotion, cognition, motivation and pleasurable feelings, so when abuse of drugs is present, drugs can release up to ten times the amount of dopamine and last longer than the natural amount of dopamine released, and this is what motivates people to use substance over and over again, in other words, abuse substances.  Whenever the brain’s pleasure route is activated, the brain records that something important is happening that needs to be remembered, and teaches us to do it again and again, without thinking about it.

The brain adjusts to the surges in dopamine by producing less dopamine and as a result a substance abuser’s brain can become abnormally low, this is why sometimes a substance abuser will eventually feel listless and depressed and is unable to enjoy things he once enjoyed, but a substance user need to use more substance to bring the dopamine function back to normal, there fore they have to take larger amounts of substance in order to raise the dopamine level, known as tolerance.

Glutamate is another neurotransmitter in the brain responsible not just also for pleasure but for the ability to learn.  When glutamate is compromised by substance use, the brain tries to make a balance for this change which can cause cognitive impairment; likely, long term substance use can trigger adjustments in habit or non conscious memory such as conditioning.

Conditioning is a type of learning, where the environment associated with the substance experienced can prompt uncontrollable cravings if a person is exposed to these reminders, even without the drug itself being available, for example, every time you see the person who made the substance available to you, it will automatically set off your brain to make an associate to this person with the substance and this can emerge even years after abstinence.

The people who suffer from substance addiction usually have another medical issue.  Substance abuse and mental disorder usually co exist so what comes first, the addiction or the mental disorder

Mental disorder may precede addiction and in other cases substance abuse may generate mental disorder particularly with people who have certain weaknesses.

All in all, it is easy to become addicted to just about anything that we seem to like, the danger is when we like it so much that we overuse it and when something is overused, it is being abused.

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